Sanaa-tized? Rights groups sue State Dept for refusing to evacuate 1,000s of Americans from Yemen

People wait in the departure lounge at Sanaa International Airport, where foreigners are being evacuated from Yemen April 6, 2015. (Reuters/Khaled Abdullah) / Reuters

The US government has been sued over abandoning its citizens in Yemen, where up to 4,000 Americans are feared stranded. Pentagon officials claim an evacuation would be too dangerous for military personnel to carry out.

After the US Embassy in Yemen was evacuated along with all military personnel, there were no US forces left in
the country to help American citizens who got stuck amid the
worsening armed conflict.

Three Arab and Muslim human rights groups united in preparing a
lawsuit bringing dozens of cases of American citizens denied
evacuation from Yemen to the attention of the Obama
administration. Some of the families stranded in Yemen have small
children, maintains a lawsuit filed on Thursday, McClatchy DC
reports.

“The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), the
Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Asian Americans
Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus (ALC) today announced the
filing of a lawsuit against Secretary of State John Kerry and
Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter seeking government action to
evacuate American citizens trapped in Yemen,” CAIR said in a
statement Thursday.

The lawsuit personally targets US Secretary of State John Kerry
and Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter for failing to protect US
citizens in Yemen. The document names 41 plaintiffs in the case,
while the total number of US citizens in Yemen is estimated at
between 3,000 and 4,000.

Over 500 American citizens have registered on the website
www.stuckinyemen.com so
far. According to the human rights organizations, most of the
American citizens remaining in Yemen are of Yemeni origin.

“Currently there are hundreds of families stuck actually in
Yemen that are US citizens. They are asking me on a daily basis
if there's any concrete evacuation,” Summer Nasser, an
activist and freelance author, told RT by phone from the Yemeni
town of Yafa.

“If there's a chance and there's no concrete evacuation from
the State Department directly, they should just use other
countries and airlines that may evacuate citizens,” Nasser
said.

The State Department suggests that Americans should arrange their
departure with the US Embassy in Djibouti, a small state situated
on the Horn of Africa, 250 kilometers across the sea from the
nearest Yemeni port, Aden. But according to McClatchy DC, at
least two American citizens, a Californian woman and a mother of
four from New York, made contact with diplomats in Djibouti only
to learn that there would be no help.

A 21-year-old Brooklyn man, Sallah Elhushayshi, told McClatchy
DC: “All day the question I ask myself is: Why is the United
States not helping us?” Elhushayshi went to Yemen last year
to get married and visit his family.

“Did you hear that? It’s a war now,” he said as gunfire
crackled in the background when he was calling from the city of
Taiz.

“People are fighting, guns everywhere,” he said. “We
feel afraid. We have nothing. We’re worried about food and water
every day. We feel hopeless, really.”

The International Federation of the Red Cross reported Thursday
that according to Yemeni health officials, up to 1,042 people
have died in the fighting so far, including at least one American
citizen who came to Yemen to evacuate his family.

“As American Yemenis, we’re all really sad about what’s going
on,” said Mohammed Alazzani, 27, a cousin of American
citizen Jamal al Labani, a gas station owner from Oakland,
California, who was killed in an airstrike in Yemen. “They
just don’t believe it, that their government isn’t doing
anything. Some of them are starting to say, ‘They don’t consider
us real Americans. We’re second-class.’”

“The situation in Yemen is dangerous and unpredictable,”
the US official said. “Sending in military assets, even for
an evacuation operation, could put U.S. citizen lives at greater
risk,” the official said, stressing that there are no
current plans to evacuate “private citizens.”

In the meantime US aircraft tankers continue refueling Saudi
bombers that inflict airstrikes on positions of Houthi rebels.

“You can expect we will do so every day from now on,”
Pentagon spokesman Army Col. Steve Warren told McClatchy.

Chinese soldiers even had to disembark to the port of Aden to
ensure security of the evacuees after an unknown party opened
fire on a vessel evacuating foreign citizens, a Yemeni official
told Sputnik.

“We’re not asking for anything out of the ordinary. We’re
just asking them to fulfill their duties,” said Abed Ayoub,
legal and policy director of the American-Arab
Anti-Discrimination Committee, one of the advocacy groups behind
the lawsuit to the US government.

“India took out over 4,000 of their nationals in three days.
If India can do it, why can’t the US?”

Aircraft from Moscow, evacuating Russians from the international
airport of the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, so far have made five
flights. They also evacuated citizens of several other states,
among them Belarusians, Poles, Ukrainians, Kyrgyz and Uzbeks.